A Plan to Add Supermarkets to Poor Areas, With Healthy Results

City officials point to crowds at the suburban-size Pathmark supermarket in East Harlem as proof of the demand for healthy food in areas that lack it.Credit
Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

The Bloomberg administration, in its ever-expanding campaign to make New Yorkers eat better, has already clamped down on trans fats, deployed fruit vendors to produce-poor neighborhoods and prodded corner bodegas to sell leafy green vegetables and low-fat milk.

Now, in a city known more for hot dogs and egg creams than the apple of its nickname, officials want to establish an even bigger beachhead for healthy food — new supermarkets in areas where fresh produce is scarce and where poverty, obesity and diabetes run high.

Under a proposal the City Planning Commission unanimously approved on Wednesday, the city would offer zoning and tax incentives to spur the development of full-service grocery stores that devote a certain amount of space to fresh produce, meats, dairy and other perishables.

The plan — which has broad support among food policy experts, supermarket executives and City Council members, whose approval is needed — would permit developers to construct larger buildings than existing zoning would ordinarily allow, and give tax abatements and exemptions for approved stores in large swaths of northern Manhattan, central Brooklyn and the South Bronx, as well as downtown Jamaica in Queens.

“This is about being able to walk to get your groceries in those areas that are really, really underserved and basically have no place to buy fresh produce,” said Amanda M. Burden, the city planning commissioner. Residents in such areas, she said, have been spending “their grocery dollars at Duane Reade and CVS on chips and soda.”

The move comes as governments across the nation struggle to solve what public health advocates call an epidemic of obesity and diabetes. Schools have banned sugary drinks; lawmakers have helped urban farms spread like crabgrass on undeveloped lots; and cities like Los Angeles and Berkeley, Calif., have limited the concentration of fast-food restaurants in low-income areas.

But the New York proposal, adapted from a Pennsylvania program that provides grants and loans for supermarket construction, is unusual because it employs a mix of zoning and financial incentives to attract, rather than repel, a narrowly defined type of commercial enterprise.

“It is exciting to see that City Planning is taking an initiative to address food because the planning profession has really ignored the food system for the past 100 years,” said Nevin Cohen, an assistant professor of urban studies at the New School, pointing out that the Bloomberg administration’s elaborate blueprint to guide future development, PlaNYC 2030, barely mentions food.

The new zoning would break down some barriers that grocery stores face, said Ben Thomases, the city’s food policy coordinator, including competition from drugstores and other retailers that have higher profit margins than supermarkets do and can pay higher rents.

Under the proposed rules, a residential building with a fresh-food store could be up to 20,000 square feet larger than would normally be allowed, enabling developers to make more money by building more apartments.

Smaller stores in certain commercial and manufacturing districts would be exempt from a requirement that they provide customer parking. And in manufacturing districts, developers could build stores of up to 30,000 square feet — the current limit is 10,000 — without going through the city’s laborious and expensive land-use review process.

Although there has been little opposition to the proposal’s goals, labor leaders have insisted that the stores be required to pay so-called living wages and offer health benefits to employees.

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Efforts to encourage the city’s bodegas to stock low-fat milk and fresh produce have been less successful than originally hoped, with health department officials now focusing their efforts on 60 stores every six months, rather than the roughly 1,000 they started with in the two programs in 2006.

And though there is anecdotal evidence that customers have been flocking to some of the fruit and vegetable carts the city is helping to place along the sidewalks of poor neighborhoods, it is too early to know if there will be enough demand to keep them in business.

Avi Kaner, a co-owner of Morton Williams, which operates 12 supermarkets in New York and New Jersey, including two in the Bronx, praised the new proposal as a “very worthy endeavor to improve nutrition,” but said the city should focus on education in attacking the root causes of obesity and diet-related illness.

“If you force distribution of product to a population that’s not interested in it, or not educated in it, and the grocery stores can’t make a profit,” he said, “they’ll eventually leave.”

City officials, who have mounted several public education campaigns to improve nutrition, point to the rising use of food stamps at farmers’ markets and the crowds of shoppers at the enormous Pathmark on 125th Street in East Harlem as proof of the pent-up demand for locally grown cauliflower and packages of boneless chicken breasts in the so-called food deserts that lack them.

The Pennsylvania program, for instance, has, over the last four years, financed 74 supermarkets across the state, about a quarter of them in Philadelphia; relatively few have gone out of business. In addition, the markets have created or preserved thousands of jobs and stimulated economic development around them, supporters of the approach say. New York officials said they expected to help create 15 new stores and upgrade 10 existing ones.

The plan appears to be as much about economics as it is about changing unhealthy habits. Supporters say that more supermarkets will bring sales tax revenue to the city and sorely needed jobs to poor communities, while encouraging gentrification to continue its sweep across the boroughs.

“If you’re thinking of moving your family to the Lower Concourse,” Ms. Burden said, referring to a large manufacturing area in the South Bronx that the commission recently rezoned to include residential construction, “you’re going to say, like, ‘Wow, there is no grocery store here. I’m not going to move here.’ ”

The new stores’ primary business must be selling groceries, and the zoning proposal is explicit about just what they must sell: Of a minimum of 6,000 square feet devoted to grocery items, at least 3,000 square feet must be reserved for food.

The proposal would also require store owners to display signs at the entrances that include a special “Fresh” logo from the planning department and the statement, “This store sells fresh food.”

Many supermarket chains, from bargain to upscale ones, said they hoped to take advantage of the incentives.

“It’s definitely enticing for us,” said Christina Minardi, president for the Northeast region at Whole Foods. She said that the chain, which has half a dozen stores in Manhattan, had been sporadically looking to open a store in Harlem, an area it might not typically move into, but where “an incentive might help.”

Generally, she said, Whole Foods stores need a certain concentration of “people that live our lifestyle,” which includes a concern for “what they’re putting into their bodies.” Santino Montalbano, the director of real estate for Western Beef, which operates a number of large warehouse-style stores in mixed-income New York neighborhoods, also praised the proposal, which he said would make it easier to compete with stores like Rite Aid.

“They’re just making more on their drugs than we are” on groceries, he said. “We’re just making pennies on our cans of corn.”

A version of this article appears in print on September 24, 2009, on Page A33 of the New York edition with the headline: A Plan to Add Supermarkets, and Fresh Food, to the City’s Poorer Neighborhoods. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe